“Doomsday: End-of-the-World Scenarios” by Richard Moran

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Doomsday: End-of-the-World Scenarios by Richard Moran

Book Review

Reviewed July 29, 2006
Rating: 3 stars

A collection of hypothetical apocalypses, each backed with relevant scientific info and explained in detail by the author, a “global disaster expert”. Sounds like my kind of book, right? And, at first, it certainly was—the imagined Armageddons are plausible enough to stick in one’s mind for awhile. But the chilling immediacy of each scenario is undermined by the author’s almost tangible hysteria—if he is indeed an expert on this stuff, I’d assume it’s become rather rote to him by now, which may be why he’s trying to get past his own routine-induced calm and assure us all that THIS IS HOW IT’S GONNA HAPPEN, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIEEEE. Of course, not all of these things are going to happen, and they couldn’t all happen at once, and since each chapter ends with dire warnings of doom, it’s not long before the reader stops taking it seriously. With all these scenarios being thrown at me, I ended up playing a kind of epic Rock-Paper-Scissors: mega-tsunami beats insect invasion, new ice age beats mega-tsunami, the greenhouse effect beats new ice age… It’s an interesting book, and a (grimly) entertaining read — and, like I said, the scenarios are all fairly plausible — but it’s a bit too hyper-hysterical to be taken very seriously.